At current the Internet is kind of a waste of time, they're probably better off without it, are getting more important things done, reading more books, etc.
There's two classes of voltage regulators: linear regulators (LDOs, Low DropOuts, anymore really) and switching regulators (which includes buck, boost, and buck-boost types). LDOs are inexpensive but even though the drop across the FET is low compared to a bipolar transistor, it's still a voltage drop. A switching regulator charges an inductor then discharges it into filter capacitors and can be more efficient than an LDO depending on whether it was designed properly. However an LDO is cheap both in production cost and PCB footprint used (typically one IC with maybe a couple decaps on the input and output) whereas a switcher is more expensive in both production cost and PCB footprint (the latter even if it's a high-frequency, i.e. MHz-range switching frequency, thus being able to use a tiny inductor and small filter caps). When your production run of your consumer device is in the hundreds of thousands, there's pressure to go with the less expensive options, so many have LDOs instead of switchers even if it's not the best choice -- therefore whereas battery supply voltage is a known variable, they may not be able to fully drain them before the device stops functioning.
Furthermore some devices just plain aren't as effective with a lower terminal voltage than they are otherwise. Consider that the difference in voltage between a 4-cell akaline primary battery pack and a 4-cell NiMH battery pack is ~1.2V (based on nominal terminal voltage of alkaline cells is 1.5V and NiMH is 1.2V; we won't consider that out-of-the-package-new akalines are more like 1.6V and the 'surface charge' of a freshly-charged NiMH is more like 1.3V). A high-current-draw device may not function satisfactorily on 4.8V in this scenario, regardless of whether they're fully-charged cells or not, and regardless of the cell's internal resistance being low (which affects maximum current delivery more than anything else, really).
You also have to consider that the total mAH capacity of a AA-size NiMH cell is a fraction of what a AA-size alkaline primary cell is -- and let's also not forget that regardless of being able to purchase C and D-size NiMH cells, they're still AA-size inside the outer casing; only AAA-size NiMH are actually smaller. That limits the applications, and also increases consumer frustration, when the need C or D cells and get only a fraction of the total runtime before having to spend hours and hours waiting for the cells to recharge.
If you're going to trot out anecdotes as 'proof' that there's no real difference, then hear this: I can't even put AA-size NiMH cells into the 'Atomic' clocks I have, which aren't old, without them not working correctly (mainly display clarity issues). My TV remotes don't really work very reliably on them either.
I'll stick by something I said in an earlier comment: If they start designing them with an extra battery slot, and provide you with a 'shunt' to put in it's place if you want to use alkaline cells instead of rechargeable, then I think that'd be a great idea, or design them for the much lower terminal voltage of a pack with NiMH cells in them.
Well, sure. ISPs want the 'service' they provide to be treated like some Boutique Service, not the public utility the Internet has become, so they can charge everyone up the ass for it and expect a 'thank you' from us while we're being anally violated. They know damned well though that those days are numbered and are fighting against the inevitable.
Yeah. I don't agree with everything Brown says or does (I voted against the high-speed rail project and am dubious at best about the Delta Tunnels), but I voted for Brown, and overwhelmingly so I don't regret that and will actually be sad to see him go -- and am a bit apprehensious about what happens next.
..again, {citation needed}, and anecdotal experiences don't necessarily mean anything. Plenty of devices don't work properly when they're running off 20% less rail voltage.
I am aware of the discharge curve of the chemistry of various cells. As for the rest of it, {citation needed}, please, and just because someone's anecdotes indicate they've "had no problems for decades" doesn't mean that's typical experience or in any way a reflection of overall reality.
NiMH cells are 1.2V nominal, alkaline primary batteries are 1.5V nominal; devices designed for alkaline primary batteries won't necessarily work correctly (or work correclty for very long) with 1.2V cells. 1.2V is considered "discharged" for an alkaline battery, by the way. Rechargeable cells would be fine, but they need to be 1.5V nominal like what they're replacing; otherwise you need to redesign products to work with 1.2V cells, or with a 'dummy' slot so you can use 1 extra 1.2V cell.
IT DOESN'T THINK. That's the core problem. We don't have actual Artificial Intelligence; we have pseudo-intelligence, at best., and at the rate we're going there may never be any such thing as actual 'AI'.
The corporations who have invested countless millions in the development of so-called 'self driving cars' are now discovering that it wasn't just another typical R&D cycle, and that they aren't going to magically become 'sentient' and perform 100% perfect 100% of the time -- so they're covering their asses as much as possible, while still rushing the 'product' (as fatally flawed as it is) to market, so they don't get lynched by their stockholders and investors, and all of us will pay the ultimate price for all that, when half-assed machines on wheels start senselessly killing people because it's not up to the task and can't tell the difference between a living being and lamppost.
However, if the company is held responsible for each and every one of those remaining accidents, are they going to sell those cars? Probably not. This means we will keep having twice as many accidents as we could have.
I'm more than okay with that. If it's not damned near perfect at driving a car, then I don't want it on the roads, at all, because the stupid mistakes it'll make, that any human would have avoided, will probably mean someone gets killed, and someone senselessly losing their life at the hands of some half-assed machine (that doesn't even know the difference between a LIVING BEING and a lamppost!) that was rushed to market by greedy corporations who want to make their R&D money back is an orders-of-magnitude worse tragedy than if a human was driving. Please, for fuck's sake, stop with the 'magical thinking' about so-called 'self driving cars', you're inviting disaster.
Oh look, someone with a brain, who knows how to use it! Thank you for being you!
Yes, we don't have 'artificial intelligence', we have 'pseudo-intelligence' at best, and it's not even really all that great, not really much better than what they had in the 90's. We just have smaller, more powerful hardware for them to run their software on is all. None of what we have right now is ever going to become sentient, self-aware, or actually capable of actual cognition, let alone having a 'personality', 'consciousness', or capable in any way shape or form being equivalent of a 'person'. In my opinion the approach they're using for the current state of pseudo-intelligence is completely wrong because we don't even really begin to understand how a biological brain produces these phenomena; at best they're creating insultingly crude mimickry of those qualities. Your dog or cat is smarter than these machines they keep trotting out.
Unless you invent a Philosophers' Stone that magically converts nuclear material to something inert, there is no 'self destruct mechanism' for any kind of nuclear reactor, unless you have an eject mechanism that dumps it into the ocean -- and even then pirates could be equipped to retrieve it.
Nothing wrong with wind-powered ships; after all, don't you lose less energy by cutting out an energy-conversion step? Why convert wind to electricity to drive electric motors when you can drive the ship directly?
Gee, thanks so much for that, not all of us are superstitious mouth-breathing anti-vax creationist bible-thumping Dominionist Trump voters who believe the Earth is only 6000 years old, you jackass.
Unless you want to go back to relatively slow prop-driven aircraft, that would have to land frequently to recharge or exchange battery packs, there's going to be a long, perhaps impossible development cycle for the equivalent of a jet engine that's electric (assuming that's what the intended solution is). Given how an internal-combustion jet engine works, I don't know if it's even possible to design one (or re-design jet fuel) to reduce emissions. It's not like you can slap a catalytic converter onto a jet engine. You wouldn't even be able to use nuclear power for civilian aircraft because no nation on the planet would allow it. We might at some point have to make a tradeoff between speed, convenience, and pollution potential and bring back airships.
They could use thorium, which is safer than uranium. You could design the ships in such a way that the last-ditch safety mechanism for the reactor would be to eject the core into the ocean, where it would have essentially infinite cooling. Also don't most cargo ships employ their own private security anyway? Just arm them better against pirates.
We DO NOT HAVE real AI, all we have is PSEUDO-INTELLIGENCE, there is no 'person' inside that box, goddamnit!There is no 'consciousness', 'self-awareness', 'sentience', or any other trait/phenomenon we attribute to human beings inside these machines, they are just SOFTWARE. They are not people by any stretch of the imagination, stop anthropomorphizing them, this is not TV or the movies, that is all just FICTION, stop belieiving it's real!
Machines are machines and if they malfunction and hurt/kill someone, the MANUFACTURER is ultimately responsible, the MACHINE cannot by definition be 'held responsible' because it is just a MACHINE!
Friend, this is all about Donald Trumps' fragile ego and, I suspect, his barely average IQ. He can't handle the fact that Jeff Bezos not only owns the Washington Post, which rightly criticizes Trump practically every day (and we all know Trump throws temper-tantrums whenever someone disagrees with him, questions him, or criticizes him), but also that Bezos is richer and a more successful businessman than Trump ever was or ever will be.
Slashdot Mirror
At current the Internet is kind of a waste of time, they're probably better off without it, are getting more important things done, reading more books, etc.
There's two classes of voltage regulators: linear regulators (LDOs, Low DropOuts, anymore really) and switching regulators (which includes buck, boost, and buck-boost types). LDOs are inexpensive but even though the drop across the FET is low compared to a bipolar transistor, it's still a voltage drop. A switching regulator charges an inductor then discharges it into filter capacitors and can be more efficient than an LDO depending on whether it was designed properly. However an LDO is cheap both in production cost and PCB footprint used (typically one IC with maybe a couple decaps on the input and output) whereas a switcher is more expensive in both production cost and PCB footprint (the latter even if it's a high-frequency, i.e. MHz-range switching frequency, thus being able to use a tiny inductor and small filter caps). When your production run of your consumer device is in the hundreds of thousands, there's pressure to go with the less expensive options, so many have LDOs instead of switchers even if it's not the best choice -- therefore whereas battery supply voltage is a known variable, they may not be able to fully drain them before the device stops functioning.
Furthermore some devices just plain aren't as effective with a lower terminal voltage than they are otherwise. Consider that the difference in voltage between a 4-cell akaline primary battery pack and a 4-cell NiMH battery pack is ~1.2V (based on nominal terminal voltage of alkaline cells is 1.5V and NiMH is 1.2V; we won't consider that out-of-the-package-new akalines are more like 1.6V and the 'surface charge' of a freshly-charged NiMH is more like 1.3V). A high-current-draw device may not function satisfactorily on 4.8V in this scenario, regardless of whether they're fully-charged cells or not, and regardless of the cell's internal resistance being low (which affects maximum current delivery more than anything else, really).
You also have to consider that the total mAH capacity of a AA-size NiMH cell is a fraction of what a AA-size alkaline primary cell is -- and let's also not forget that regardless of being able to purchase C and D-size NiMH cells, they're still AA-size inside the outer casing; only AAA-size NiMH are actually smaller. That limits the applications, and also increases consumer frustration, when the need C or D cells and get only a fraction of the total runtime before having to spend hours and hours waiting for the cells to recharge.
If you're going to trot out anecdotes as 'proof' that there's no real difference, then hear this: I can't even put AA-size NiMH cells into the 'Atomic' clocks I have, which aren't old, without them not working correctly (mainly display clarity issues). My TV remotes don't really work very reliably on them either.
I'll stick by something I said in an earlier comment: If they start designing them with an extra battery slot, and provide you with a 'shunt' to put in it's place if you want to use alkaline cells instead of rechargeable, then I think that'd be a great idea, or design them for the much lower terminal voltage of a pack with NiMH cells in them.
Well, sure. ISPs want the 'service' they provide to be treated like some Boutique Service, not the public utility the Internet has become, so they can charge everyone up the ass for it and expect a 'thank you' from us while we're being anally violated. They know damned well though that those days are numbered and are fighting against the inevitable.
Yeah. I don't agree with everything Brown says or does (I voted against the high-speed rail project and am dubious at best about the Delta Tunnels), but I voted for Brown, and overwhelmingly so I don't regret that and will actually be sad to see him go -- and am a bit apprehensious about what happens next.
twice as many deaths
{citation needed}
There's NO PROOF these half-assed machines will do any such thing. So far they've been nothing but a horrifying disappointment.
..or eat the plastics on an airplane in flight, causing it to crash? Or anything else synthetic?
..again, {citation needed}, and anecdotal experiences don't necessarily mean anything. Plenty of devices don't work properly when they're running off 20% less rail voltage.
I am aware of the discharge curve of the chemistry of various cells. As for the rest of it, {citation needed}, please, and just because someone's anecdotes indicate they've "had no problems for decades" doesn't mean that's typical experience or in any way a reflection of overall reality.
NiMH cells are 1.2V nominal, alkaline primary batteries are 1.5V nominal; devices designed for alkaline primary batteries won't necessarily work correctly (or work correclty for very long) with 1.2V cells. 1.2V is considered "discharged" for an alkaline battery, by the way. Rechargeable cells would be fine, but they need to be 1.5V nominal like what they're replacing; otherwise you need to redesign products to work with 1.2V cells, or with a 'dummy' slot so you can use 1 extra 1.2V cell.
No worries, it may take a while but the needle will swing back towards the center again and we'll get them OUT, bet on it.
I've already commented on this subject so I can't use my mod points but you should be modded up for this.
IT DOESN'T THINK. That's the core problem. We don't have actual Artificial Intelligence; we have pseudo-intelligence, at best., and at the rate we're going there may never be any such thing as actual 'AI'.
Hear, hear.
The corporations who have invested countless millions in the development of so-called 'self driving cars' are now discovering that it wasn't just another typical R&D cycle, and that they aren't going to magically become 'sentient' and perform 100% perfect 100% of the time -- so they're covering their asses as much as possible, while still rushing the 'product' (as fatally flawed as it is) to market, so they don't get lynched by their stockholders and investors, and all of us will pay the ultimate price for all that, when half-assed machines on wheels start senselessly killing people because it's not up to the task and can't tell the difference between a living being and lamppost.
However, if the company is held responsible for each and every one of those remaining accidents, are they going to sell those cars? Probably not. This means we will keep having twice as many accidents as we could have.
I'm more than okay with that. If it's not damned near perfect at driving a car, then I don't want it on the roads, at all, because the stupid mistakes it'll make, that any human would have avoided, will probably mean someone gets killed, and someone senselessly losing their life at the hands of some half-assed machine (that doesn't even know the difference between a LIVING BEING and a lamppost!) that was rushed to market by greedy corporations who want to make their R&D money back is an orders-of-magnitude worse tragedy than if a human was driving. Please, for fuck's sake, stop with the 'magical thinking' about so-called 'self driving cars', you're inviting disaster.
Oh look, someone with a brain, who knows how to use it! Thank you for being you!
Yes, we don't have 'artificial intelligence', we have 'pseudo-intelligence' at best, and it's not even really all that great, not really much better than what they had in the 90's. We just have smaller, more powerful hardware for them to run their software on is all. None of what we have right now is ever going to become sentient, self-aware, or actually capable of actual cognition, let alone having a 'personality', 'consciousness', or capable in any way shape or form being equivalent of a 'person'. In my opinion the approach they're using for the current state of pseudo-intelligence is completely wrong because we don't even really begin to understand how a biological brain produces these phenomena; at best they're creating insultingly crude mimickry of those qualities. Your dog or cat is smarter than these machines they keep trotting out.
Unless you invent a Philosophers' Stone that magically converts nuclear material to something inert, there is no 'self destruct mechanism' for any kind of nuclear reactor, unless you have an eject mechanism that dumps it into the ocean -- and even then pirates could be equipped to retrieve it.
Yes, but if you're now carrying nuclear materials on every voyage, that would change.
Nothing wrong with wind-powered ships; after all, don't you lose less energy by cutting out an energy-conversion step? Why convert wind to electricity to drive electric motors when you can drive the ship directly?
The only place coal should ever be used anymore is in the Christmas stockings of chronically misbehaving little children.
Gee, thanks so much for that, not all of us are superstitious mouth-breathing anti-vax creationist bible-thumping Dominionist Trump voters who believe the Earth is only 6000 years old, you jackass.
Unless you want to go back to relatively slow prop-driven aircraft, that would have to land frequently to recharge or exchange battery packs, there's going to be a long, perhaps impossible development cycle for the equivalent of a jet engine that's electric (assuming that's what the intended solution is). Given how an internal-combustion jet engine works, I don't know if it's even possible to design one (or re-design jet fuel) to reduce emissions. It's not like you can slap a catalytic converter onto a jet engine. You wouldn't even be able to use nuclear power for civilian aircraft because no nation on the planet would allow it. We might at some point have to make a tradeoff between speed, convenience, and pollution potential and bring back airships.
They could use thorium, which is safer than uranium. You could design the ships in such a way that the last-ditch safety mechanism for the reactor would be to eject the core into the ocean, where it would have essentially infinite cooling. Also don't most cargo ships employ their own private security anyway? Just arm them better against pirates.
We DO NOT HAVE real AI, all we have is PSEUDO-INTELLIGENCE, there is no 'person' inside that box, goddamnit! There is no 'consciousness', 'self-awareness', 'sentience', or any other trait/phenomenon we attribute to human beings inside these machines, they are just SOFTWARE. They are not people by any stretch of the imagination, stop anthropomorphizing them, this is not TV or the movies, that is all just FICTION, stop belieiving it's real!
Machines are machines and if they malfunction and hurt/kill someone, the MANUFACTURER is ultimately responsible, the MACHINE cannot by definition be 'held responsible' because it is just a MACHINE!
For fuck's sake stop this nonsense already!
Friend, this is all about Donald Trumps' fragile ego and, I suspect, his barely average IQ. He can't handle the fact that Jeff Bezos not only owns the Washington Post, which rightly criticizes Trump practically every day (and we all know Trump throws temper-tantrums whenever someone disagrees with him, questions him, or criticizes him), but also that Bezos is richer and a more successful businessman than Trump ever was or ever will be.
LOL no we're talking about Trump here, it'd be more like "I think Man going to the Moon was fake news and I'm ordering an audit of NASA over it!"